In constant motion: Woolf Works performed by the Royal Ballet (photo: Alastair Muir)

Wayne McGregor’s latest work for the Royal Ballet is one of vision and ambition. In Woolf Works, dance, design, lighting, film and music are all equal players, but the guiding force is modernist writer Virginia Woolf. McGregor channels her experimental approach to form and narrative and it leads him to new, sometimes surprising, territory.

Each of the three acts is inspired by a different novel – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves – but the author herself is also woven through, embodied by the veteran dancer Alessandra Ferri, returning to the stage aged 52.

The titular Clarissa Dalloway walks the streets of London as a collage of city sounds circle the audience. It’s a game of glimpses, fragments and memories, with a moving dance of desperation from Edward Watson as shellshocked soldier Septimus Smith. The movement is more classical and more lyrical than the twisted extremes McGregor is known for, but the bodies are still in constant motion, exactly like Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose.

Time-travelling, gender-bending biography Orlando is represented by some fantastic historico-futurism. Laser beams and warp-speed choreography give a sense of hurtling through time, as gold lamé Elizabethan ruffs are shed in favour of nude-toned androgyny. Composer Max Richter provides a button-pushing minimal-ish soundtrack, creating the emotional frame for the work in the same way that lighting and sets build physical spaces.

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Sara Baras

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Mixed Bill/Ballet Black

It’s not all unqualified success. The third act begins with a mesmerising slowest-of-slow motion film of swelling tides accompanied by Woolf’s own suicidal words, but the waves of dancers that follow can’t harness the same great emotional or elemental power (and what’s going on with those weird masks?).

Ferri has poise and grace, but feels somewhat of a muted presence, a little swallowed by the multi-sensory onslaught, perhaps. Others blast their way through it all – the powerfully feline Natalia Osipova moves as though she’s the one setting the pace, and Steven McRae has jagged swagger. There are many layers to unpeel, but the prevailing mood in this impressionistic work is one of deep sorrow, coloured by Woolf’s own life, work and death.